I was on tour in Europe and Paolo came to Turin. His fantastic Il Divo had
recently played in New
York and had gotten great reviews, so I was really happy to meet with him. He
and his producers said
they were working on another movie and told me some of what it is about. They
didn't explain the
whole story just that it was based on this retired rock star, and they wanted me
to do some music
for it. I thought that it was an ambitious jump to go from a beautiful and
incredible but not widely
seen Italian movie to what seemed to me a pretty large scale English language
movie. So I told them
that I was around and on tour and that they should get back in touch when they
had the money and
things were in place. Lo and behold a year later they were ready and had a date
when they were
going to start shooting and wanted to talk about the music again. I was
surprised but really pleased.
So I read the script and there were three things Paolo was looking for. Firstly
he wanted me and my
band to perform a Talking Heads song live in one scene, which was not very
complicated. The second
thing was that as part of the story, the main character is handed a CD of song
demos by a young
singer/songwriter and they needed those songs because Sean Penn's character
listens to this CD
song by song during the course of his travels. The difficulty of that was that I
could write them but it
couldn't be me singing on it because people would recognise my voice and it
obviously wouldn't be
that kid, it had to be believably the voice of that kid. The third part was the
score. Paolo had
examples of instrumental pieces, the style of contemporary classical pieces that
he had in mind for
the score. But I kind of backed away from the score part because I thought I was
going to have my
hands full with the demos that this kid wrote and recorded. They couldn't sound
too slick or well
produced, they needed to sound a little unfinished.

In the script Paolo mentions Will Oldham, also known as Bonnie Prince Billy, as
kind of a musical
touchstone, and in fact this kid performs in a shopping mall and sings one of
Will's songs. So I said to
Paolo, "Why don't you ask Will to do the songs then, as there is a resonance for
you in what he
does?" He wasn't sure, but I had met Will earlier on in my tour, so I suggested
I get in touch with him
and see if he wanted to do the songs together. Paolo agreed and surprisingly
Will said he'd give it a
try. I thought before we went too far down the road of writing songs and words,
let's throw down
some really rough versions and vocals, and send that to Paolo to see if we were
on the right lines. I
thought that might be easier than Paolo trying to describe the music he wants
which is really hard to
do. Some of them worked, so Will and I continued to work on those, sent more to
Paolo in this very
rough form and he again accepted a couple more and the rest went back on my
shelf. So that
became the process by which we finished everything, except for one song for
which Will wrote all
the words, which was interesting because the lyrics were unlike anything I would
have written.
That's the reason to work on something together, to produce something that you
wouldn't have
done by yourself.

Then, because the young actor from Dublin who plays the kid with the demos
wasn't such a great
singer, we needed someone else's voice on there that would be believable as this
kid's voice. So I
found an Irish singer here in New York whose speaking voice was kind of a high
tenor voice and who
has just the tiniest hint of an Irish accent. We found him through MySpace, he
came in and sang the
songs and did a great job.

The name of the band in the movie is 'Pieces of Shit' which makes you think it's
going to be a punk
band, and the music we came up with didn't really fit that. Paolo did give some
direction, that we
should pull one song in a more melancholy direction and make another one more
upbeat. The main
character is modelled on Robert Smith, the singer from The Cure, and I told
Paolo that if he wanted
it to sound more like The Cure, I probably wasn't the best person for the job.
But he said he didn't
want that, he thought Cheyenne would be more moved by music that sounded
different to his past
work, it was more about him hearing something that pushed him into another
place.

Paolo asked me to be in a couple of small scenes and play myself which of course
raises the question
- how do I do that? I told Paolo that I have no ambitions to be an actor, and he
said 'No, I don't want
you to be yourself, I want you to play David Byrne,' which seemed even more
convoluted! But I
thought Sean Penn is going to be so much in character, so if I just react to
what his character says as
I would in real life, then that could work. We make a pretty weird couple, this
Cheyenne character
and I, though the idea of our being friends isn't so farfetched.

On Cheyenne and Sean Penn

When Paolo described the story to me and I read the script, I realised Sean Penn
was going to have
to be in this Robert Smith / Goth make up for pretty much the whole film. He has
to make you feel
for this character and not just that you're watching Sean Penn in some Goth
makeup, you have to
get beyond that and start to feel for this person underneath the lipstick and
the hair and all the
other stuff. You find out incrementally why the Cheyenne character is doing what
he is doing. You
are given some reasons in the beginning but some things you don't find out until
halfway through
the movie and only then do you realise why he's acting this way or that's why he
stopped
performing. You fill in those things as you go along and they get revealed
almost as an aside which is
very clever, I like that the audience have to put the pieces of the puzzle
together.